Michael Pillsburyhttps://michaelpillsbury.net
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1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1Scapegoating Chinahttps://michaelpillsbury.net/scapegoating-china/
Fri, 05 Jun 2020 10:07:07 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2209Another of Trump’s close advisers on China, Michael Pillsbury, has suggested that the U.S. should demand $10 million for each coronavirus death from the Chinese government. Trump has said that his administration is seriously contemplating claiming very substantial reparations from the Chinese. There is even talk of the U.S. President using his emergency war powers and defaulting on debts to China.

]]>As the COVID-19 death rate spikes and the economy tanks in the United States, Donald Trump and his advisers target China and the World Health Organisation with an eye to winning the forthcoming presidential election.

IT has been apparent for some time now that the Donald Trump administration, in order to cover up for its failure to effectively combat the COVID-19 pandemic, is going all out to target China, where the first cases were detected. Under Trump’s watch, the United States has recorded more than 1.5 million cases by the third week of May, with the death toll surpassing 90,000. According to the U.S. government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the death toll will cross the 1,00,000 figure by June 1. Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, have not let facts stand in the way as they ratchet up their accusations against China.

The U.S. has accused China of letting the virus spread to the rest of the world by either suppressing or withholding information after the first infections were detected in Wuhan in end 2019. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has once again reiterated that there is no scientific evidence to prove that the new strain of the coronavirus was created in a lab. “Everything about the stepwise evolution over time indicates that this virus evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci told the National Geographic news channel in a recent interview.

Trump announced in the last week of April that his administration was conducting “serious investigations” into Beijing’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. The U.S. administration also spearheaded calls for an international probe. China said that an inquiry into the origins and spread of the pandemic could wait until the crisis subsided. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has always maintained that if there should be an investigation it should be “scientific based” and not politically motivated. The WHO has pointed out that the U.S. has so far not sent any data to back up the allegations by the U.S. President and his Secretary of State.

The first major diplomatic broadside by the U.S. administration openly targeting China came in April when Trump announced that his administration was withholding its annual contribution of $550 million to the WHO. Trump virtually accused the WHO of misleading the international community about the origin and the spread of the virus during its early stages, in cahoots with the Chinese government. The Trump administration has also tried to portray WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as an incompetent administrator who is only interested in doing China’s bidding.

Mike Pompeo has been taking to the airwaves claiming that his administration has proof that the COVID-19 virus had its origins in a Wuhan lab. Trump has not shied away from making similar accusations, suggesting that the virus accidentally escaped from a Wuhan biological weapons lab. U.S. intelligence agencies themselves have concluded, like most of the international scientific community, that the virus in all probability had leapt from an animal to a human in a non-laboratory setting, much like the Ebola, HIV and the SARS virus. Pompeo, however, continues to insist that the onus is on Beijing to prove that the virus did not originate from a lab. The virology institute in Wuhan targeted by the Trump administration of the lapse has received training and funding from U.S. institutes and scientists.

Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser and well-known anti-China hawk, went a step further and accused the Chinese government of deliberately spreading the virus.

He announced on prime-time television: “The virus was spawned in Wuhan province. Patient zero was in November. The Chinese behind the shield of the World Health Organisation, for two months hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York, and around the world to seed that.”

Another of Trump’s close advisers on China, Michael Pillsbury, has suggested that the U.S. should demand $10 million for each coronavirus death from the Chinese government. Trump has said that his administration is seriously contemplating claiming very substantial reparations from the Chinese. There is even talk of the U.S. President using his emergency war powers and defaulting on debts to China.

The accusations and rants against the Chinese by senior Trump administration officials continue to fly despite the Office of the Director of National Intelligence releasing a statement in the last week of April, which said that the U.S. intelligence agencies concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified”. Trump and his advisers want to make China the core issue in the presidential election as the death rate spikes and the economy tanks. They seem to be willing to go to any extent to win the election.

Interestingly, until March this year, Trump was all praise for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s handling of the crisis. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency,” Trump had tweeted on January 24. “It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi.”

Pompeo, meanwhile, has been busy working the phone lines to persuade countries like India to follow suit and target China for the outbreak of the pandemic. Pompeo has had several conversations with India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.

The latest was a conference call initiated by the U.S. Secretary of State in the second week of May. The other Foreign Ministers participating included those of close allies like Australia, Israel, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Pompeo openly lobbied for support for the Trump administration’s confrontational stance against Beijing. The U.S. State Department spokesperson said that Secretary Pompeo discussed “the importance of international cooperation, transparency and accountability in combating the COVID-19 pandemic and in addressing its causes”.

As the pandemic spreads, relations between India and China have encountered some turbulence. There have been two instances of brief physical skirmishes between soldiers of the two sides along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in early May. While the Indian side played down the incident, China accused India of “trespassing and illegally building defence facilities” in the Galwan valley area in the disputed Aksai Chin area. Then came the statement by the Indian Army chief, Gen. M.M. Naravane, that “a third party” was instigating the Nepal government to take a hostile stance in its border dispute with India. Both the Nepal and the Chinese governments were angered by this insinuation.

TaiwanThe Trump administration wants countries like India to side with Taiwan as it seeks international recognition for its independence. As part of the efforts, the U.S. is pushing for Taiwan to be granted “observer status”, and eventual full membership, in the WHO. The current Taiwanese government has pursued an aggressive anti-unification position, unlike its immediate predecessor. India has so far been supported a “one China” policy and, despite New Delhi’s strategic embrace with Washington, is unlikely to give up on the long-held foreign policy principle.

Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu made conference calls to Indian journalists and succeeded in making many leading Indian newspapers highlight the issue of Taiwanese independence on its front pages and op-ed columns.

Joseph Wu blamed the WHO for putting roadblocks in the cooperation between the two countries in the fight against COVID-19. The WHO chief Ghebreyesus had complained in April about racist tweets against him emanating from Taiwan and had blamed the country’s Foreign Ministry for orchestrating a month-long social media campaign against him.

India will take over the rotating chairmanship of the World Health Assembly (WHA), the decision-making body of the WHO, for a year. The Trump administration has made the restoration of Taiwan’s observer status a priority issue, but despite the intense lobbying the overwhelming majority of the United Nations member states have refused to be pressured on the issue. Taiwan announced on the first day of the 73rd WHA conference held from May 17-19 that it was keeping its bid for “observer status” in abeyance for the time being.

The Ministry of External Affairs has not commented so far on the issue. Beijing is closely watching India’s moves at the WHO. Taiwan is being praised by the West as an exemplar in the fight against COVID-19, with the claim that Taiwan, with a population of 23 million, had recorded only 350 cases and five deaths, and should therefore be accorded special treatment in the WHO. However, the fact of the matter is that 179 of the 183 member states of the U.N. do not recognise Taiwan’s statehood.

At the conclusion of the annual WHO meeting, the member states agreed to support an “impartial, independent” examination of the WHO’s role in coordinating the global response to COVID-19. There is no mention in the resolution about looking into the origins of the pandemic as demanded by the Trump administration. The WHO members, as well as officials from China, Russia and the European Union (E.U.), were critical of the heated rhetoric from the White House. The E.U. spokesperson said that “it was a time for solidarity, not finger pointing”. There was widespread agreement that Trump’s attitude and decisions were seriously hampering the WHO’s capabilities in effectively combating the virus.

The WHO chief welcomed an independent enquiry saying that “every country and every organisation must learn from its response and experience”. Ghebreyesus also emphasised the fact that the WHO had declared the coronavirus infection “a global health emergency”, its highest level of alert, on January 30. At the time, there were fewer than 100 cases outside China.

In the following weeks, the WHO repeatedly warned that there was a narrowing “window of opportunity” to prevent the virus from spreading globally. The WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11 after it sparked epidemics in South Korea, Italy, Spain and Iran.

The WHO’s seven-member internal oversight body in a report said that the organisation “demonstrated leadership” in the way it handled the pandemic crisis. The report was critical of the “rising politicisation of the pandemic response”, a not-too-subtle dig at the Trump administration.

China was quick to welcome the resolution calling for an inquiry. Xi Jinping said China supported the idea of a comprehensive review of the global response to COVID-19 and added that the review should be conducted in “an objective and impartial manner” under the scientific leadership of the WHO.

Xi, in his address to the extraordinary virtual meeting of heads of state and health experts from around the world, offered to provide $2 billion to further bolster the fight against the pandemic. The amount promised is a substantial increase from the annual $43 million China used to contribute.

Xi also announced more financial support and medical help for African governments in their fight against the pandemic. Xi said that China had set up a “global humanitarian response depot and hub to ensure the operation of anti-epidemic supply chain”. The Trump administration was quick to characterise the Chinese offer as “a token to distract from calls by a growing number of nations demanding accountability” from the Chinese government.

Even as the WHO meeting was in progress, Trump, to the surprise of the delegates and scientists present, threatened to permanently cut off its funding if the organisation did not “show substantive improvement” in the next 30 days. He cast aspersions on WHO’s integrity once again, stating in a letter to the WHO chief “that the only way forward for the WHO is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China”.

Trump’s four-page letter to the WHO chief contained a litany of allegations. The British scientific journal The Lancet said in a statement said that Trump had falsely attributed quotes from the journal. The Lancet pointed out that it had not published any report of a virus outbreak in Wuhan in December as claimed by Trump. The journal clarified that the first report it had published about the virus outbreak in Wuhan was on January 24.

When almost all national leaders and health ministers have praised the WHO for its handling of the pandemic, U.S. Secretary of Health Alex Azar struck a discordant note, criticising the WHO and China. Azar said: “We saw that the WHO failed at its core mission of information sharing and transparency when member states do not act in good faith.” It is obvious that targeting China, and the WHO, will be the main campaign plank of the Republicans as they seek to cover up their epic mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Antonio Guterres, the U.N. Secretary General, in his address at the WHO conference, said that the pandemic should serve as “a wake-up call” for the international community. “We have seen some solidarity, but very little unity, in our response to COVID-19. Different countries have followed different, sometimes contradictory strategies, and we are paying the price,” he said. He warned that the virus was now spreading to “the global South, where its impact could be even more devastating”.

In South America, the infection rate had reached almost 5,00,000, with more than 23,000 deaths in the third week of May. Brazil, the worst affected country, has around half the cases and more than half the deaths. Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, however, remains unperturbed and continues to rail against social distancing measures and wants Brazilians to continue with their normal lives even as the health care system there is teetering on the verge of collapse.

]]>James Rosen interviews Michael Pillsbury on Trump’s statement Friday — Is this the end of the “Kissinger era” trusting China?

US-China relations: Are our adversaries contributing to unrest?James Rosen interviews Michael Pillsbury on Trump's statement Friday — Is this the end of the "Kissinger era" trusting China? https://t.co/SQ6MSSFHig

]]>How China’s Hawks Still Exploit the 1989 Tiananmen Protests | Opinionhttps://michaelpillsbury.net/how-chinas-hawks-still-exploit-the-1989-tiananmen-protests-opinion/
Tue, 02 Jun 2020 09:59:57 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2207MICHAEL PILLSBURY , SENIOR FELLOW AND DIRECTOR FOR CHINESE STRATEGY, HUDSON INSTITUTE In his Friday address on Hong Kong, President Donald Trump mused that we once hoped that “Hong Kong would be a glimpse of China’s future.” What he meant was that, for years, the consensus was that the Chinese government would evolve to resemble Hong

In his Friday address on Hong Kong, President Donald Trump mused that we once hoped that “Hong Kong would be a glimpse of China’s future.” What he meant was that, for years, the consensus was that the Chinese government would evolve to resemble Hong Kong’s: democratic, protective of civil liberties, with a free market. Hong Kong was protected by a 1984 treaty between China and Britain, valid until 2047, by which time China would be just like Hong Kong. Trump accused China of violating this treaty, while China now even denies the treaty’s validity.

On the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, it is worth taking a closer look at how China’s hardliners exploited that event to oust reformers who had been sympathetic to the demonstrators. How did these hawks use Tiananmen to transform China’s relations with America by blaming Washington, rewriting history and demonizing political opposition?

In 1989, the American foreign policy establishment agreed China was on the inevitable path to reform. It was a surprise, then, when 50,000 students marched in a Beijing memorial service for a former Communist Party head, who had been deposed by then-“paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping. For seven weeks, the students were joined in Tiananmen Square by approximately a million protestors demanding free speech, a free press and government accountability. They held copies of the Declaration of Independence and built a “Goddess of Democracy.” In the preceding few years, a few of China’s reform-minded leaders had begun to consider moving toward democracy, while hardliners organized to block them.

In late April 1989, I visited Beijing as a government analyst. Our acting ambassador, Peter Tomsen, invited me to drive to the square. No one obstructed our way as we approached a large cluster of students sporting T-shirts and long hair.

I spoke with them in Mandarin about my days as student protestor at Stanford and Columbia. A future legend who would receive the Nobel Peace Prize quickly introduced himself. He was wearing aviators and chain smoking. His name was Liu Xiaobo, of Beijing Normal University. He said that a few weeks earlier, he had been a visiting scholar at Columbia and had just flown to Beijing from New York to join the demonstrators. He would not really enter history for another 20 years, when he was imprisoned for signing the Charter 08 and advocating democracy. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but China refused to let him attend and even punished Norway for hosting a ceremony without him. His translated works prophetically warned of the rise of China’s hawks, called the ying pai. At that time in 1989, the mainstream view in the West was that these hawks would not prevail, nor would they ever use force against the students. No one imagined they would spread a powerful and false narrative.

But in May, these hawks persuaded Deng to declare martial law and rush 250,000 troops into Beijing. When the protesters refused to disperse, Deng sent in his tanks and soldiers. Hundreds of unarmed students died in the streets. Whole buildings were raked with gunfire. Soldiers kicked and clubbed protesters; tank treads rolled over their legs and backs. A lone man stood in the path of a row of tanks in the massacre’s iconic image. He was pulled away by a group of people—never to be heard from again.

After Tiananmen, many of China’s reformers (including the head of the Communist Party himself) were condemned to lifelong house arrest, while a few fled to the West to set up an exile government in Paris whose elected leader (Yan Jiaqi) had been a demonstrator and head of a prestigious research institute that had studied how to bring democracy to China. Government censorship increased—with a particular emphasis on purging the protest from Chinese news and history books. Within a year of the massacre, the Chinese government “had closed 12 percent of all newspapers, 13 percent of social science periodicals and 76 percent of China’s 534 publishing companies,” according to Minxin Pei’s From Reform to Revolution.

Though unclear to American officials at the time, June 4, 1989 was a turning point in how Chinese Communist Party leaders portrayed the United States to their internal audience. While there had always been a deep-rooted suspicion of the West within the Communist Party, it had been tempered by Mao’s calculation that China needed the West to become a superpower. Defectors later revealed that democratic reforms, even separation of powers, had been considered at the Party’s highest levels. By 2001, official documents smuggled out of China revealed how the hawks had distorted what was going on around Tiananmen to panic Deng into cracking down and dooming the reforms.

One thesis of my book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, is that these hawks have successfully persuaded the Chinese leadership to view America as a dangerous hegemon that China must replace. This view gained authority after 1989, and Beijing started systematically to demonize the U.S. government to the Chinese people. The hawks’ cry is straightforward: They claim the U.S. is overthrowing China’s government by sponsoring reformers, in part through non-government organizations.

China’s hawks were spooked by the Tiananmen protest and further frightened by the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. America’s victory in the Cold War and the outright dissolution of the USSR shook Beijing. It underscored to Chinese leaders the hawks’ anti-American conspiracy theories. In their telling, Tiananmen was America’s first secret maneuver in its campaign to “sow discord in the enemy camp,” to borrow an axiom from the Warring States period 2,500 years ago. To these radical nationalists, the United States had almost succeeded in toppling the Communist Party, and was stopped only via a last-minute purge of American “allies” from the government.

The purge of pro-American reformers in China left few reform advocates in positions of power. The ravings of China’s hawks, once dismissed as “hyper nationalists,” became official Party doctrine in the Patriotic Education Law in 1994, which China later tried to impose on Hong Kong.

The Chinese government created an extensive “alternate history” of Sino-American relations, which portrayed a devious United States, continually working to undermine the Chinese people—even as, in reality, a series of classified American presidential directives set the goal to strengthen China’s economy for two decades.

Now, an emerging generation of Chinese believes this false narrative about the United States—that for 170 years, America has tried to dominate China. China depicts American national heroes as “evil masterminds” who manipulated Chinese officials and others to weaken China. We must never cease to remind ourselves that this is a lie. Today’s Chinese hawks must not be permitted to slander and defame the one million Tiananmen protestors’ honest efforts to reform China. Retelling the truth about Tiananmen every June 4 means opposing the hawks who so craftily rewrote reality as an American conspiracy.

What was the aftermath? The young professor Liu Xiaobo died in prison in July 2017, never having seen his Nobel Peace Prize, but leaving us his book, No Enemies, No Hatred. The first elected president of the exile government, Yan Jiaqi, now 77, lives near Washington, D.C. in obscurity. No nation ever funded Mr. Yan’s Federation for a Democratic China. His detailed history Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution, describing reckless Chinese Communist Party behavior from 1966 to 1976, is still widely read.

What about the hawks of Tiananmen? The leader of the crackdown, Mr. Li Peng became China’s premier. The most famous young hawk, Wang Huning, soon wrote America Against America, a book based on visiting 20 American universities. It initiated the anti-American movement in China. Today, Mr. Wang is the second most powerful leader in China, seated next to Xi Jinping on foreign trips. Mr. Wang was the sole leader to accompany Mr. Xi on his recent visit to Wuhan. Amnesia in China about Tiananmen in 1989 has combined with the rise of Mr. Wang’s nationalist anti-U.S. views.

Reformers in China who know all this history must be keeping their heads down, secretly watching Hong Kong’s annual massive vigil on June 4 to commemorate.

Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow and director for Chinese strategy at Hudson Institute, is the author of The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.

]]>Take China seriously, not literallyhttps://michaelpillsbury.net/take-china-seriously-not-literally/
Sun, 31 May 2020 13:17:57 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2205Michael Pillsbury, partly the inspiration for President Trump's more confrontational approach to China, pointed to a book by a Chinese colonel about the "post-American era" and "duel of the century." One analyst claims the Chinese have persuaded Americans they are locked in such a duel — though a national survey by my organization, the Eurasia Group Foundation, finds little such concern among the public.

]]>Some in America’s national security establishment is fearfully trying to stoke public anxiety about China. Exasperated with unsuccessful wars against stateless terrorists, Washington now seems to think China will be the thing that concentrates U.S. foreign policy. Well before the coronavirus outbreak, the Obama administration sought, however fruitlessly, to “pivot to Asia.” In his first year in office, President Trump released a National Security Strategy, which rebranded China as a revisionist power actively trying to “erode American security and prosperity.”

As mutual recriminations play out amid the coronavirus pandemic and a new wave of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, a new generation of would-be cold warriors believes their moment has arrived. In making their case to get tough on China, they cite the words of Chinese officials as evidence of ill will.

Michael Pillsbury, partly the inspiration for President Trump’s more confrontational approach to China, pointed to a book by a Chinese colonel about the “post-American era” and “duel of the century.” One analyst claims the Chinese have persuaded Americans they are locked in such a duel — though a national survey by my organization, the Eurasia Group Foundation, finds little such concern among the public.

The 2020 presidential candidates now compete for who would be tougher on China. A Trump ad claims, “Biden protected China’s feelings.” A Biden ad retorts, “Trump rolled over for the Chinese.” Toughness by itself is neither a strategy nor a policy and it’s unclear what goals are being advanced by these rebukes. Especially when China finds it necessary to denigrate the U.S. in turn, calling U.S. criticism “lunacy” and one of its chief critics, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an “evil politician.” This verbal escalation only emboldens China hawks, and we are now careening toward a dangerous cycle.ADVERTISEMENT

When assessing a foreign government which has little culture of — or incentive for — transparency, American politicians would be wise to realize talk is cheap, and often misleading. International relations scholars and China experts have supplied ample evidence to indicate China’s assertive rhetoric frequently deviates from the country’s true intentions. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda is less an expression of the Chinese government’s foreign policy and more a grasping attempt to gin up support among and save face with the Chinese people.

Many American policymakers fail to appreciate this, and for a good reason. In the United States, the pronouncements of political and military leaders are interpreted by the press and the public as statements of policy; American democracy requires this transparency. When a president makes a State of the Union address, or a top general states a reporter, both might “spin” to impress American voters or intimidate foreign leaders — but they are penalized politically (and sometimes legally) for outright lying. Not so in China, where democratic institutions unconstrain the government, and propagandizing to the Chinese public is routine.

China’s primary security preoccupation is internal, not external. After all, it has a government of, by and for the Communist Party, which anxiously guards its power and dictates the country’s interests. The political ideology of the CCP is obsessed with unity, which is inconvenient in such a diverse and populous country. That has led to Beijing’s atrocious efforts to “re-educate” Uighur Muslims and Christians, repatriate independence-minded Tibetans and mollify democracy-loving Hongkongers. So engrossed is it in warding off these perceived threats to national cohesion, China has very little interest in picking a fight with the world’s economic and military colossus. If anything, the Chinese government is caught in a balancing act, ratcheting up its anti-U.S. rhetoric to display solidarity with an offended public while tamping down that public’s mounting nationalist fervor.

Conflicts often intensify because leaders fail to empathize with each other’s domestic constraints and predicaments. They lack the imagination to see or the political courage to admit, how an adversary’s harsh rhetoric might be intended to impress a patriotic audience at home, attributing it instead to malign intentions. (This is particularly true in the internet era when the public of one country can read the news of the other without appreciating its domestic political imperatives and norms.) The U.S. and China must not fall into this trap.

And the press must not egg them on. U.S.-China geopolitics is not a zero-sum competition. This kind of press coverage increases cynicism and decreases knowledge, and it interferes with the American public’s ability to perceive a rival country’s true motives and ambitions. ADVERTISEMENT

Two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Reagan’s secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, clung to his Cold War mind-set, claiming a “dynamic, and an expanding, Soviet threat” despite the visible dwindling of Soviet power. Had the U.S. paid as much attention to what Soviet policies, abilities and ambitions were rather than what Soviet leaders claimed them to be, we might have judiciously abstained from supporting military juntas in South America mujahedeen in Afghanistan.

Even were we to take Beijing’s rhetoric at face value, China still lacks the capacity to challenge America’s core national security interests genuinely. China faces major economic problems, which will cut down its growth rate before it achieves parity with the U.S. It lacks a network of strong alliances. The yuan is not about to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. And, as my organization has found, the Chinese public has positive views of the U.S. and American democracy, though that admiration dipped markedly in the past year.

Breathless anxiety that China is locked in an existential fight over “the rules, norms, and institutions that will govern international relations” distorts the stakes of the U.S.-China relationship. If American policymakers see China as a global threat rather than a mainly regional challenge, they risk committing resources to battles not yet worth fighting.

During the last presidential campaign, it was suggested that we take Trump seriously but not literally. The same should be said about the Chinese leadership. Bluster aside, China is a real and formidable competitor. Its interests and those of the United States are often in conflict. But America’s response should be informed by a frank assessment of China’s growing but still limited power and of America’s vital security interests.

The U.S.-China relationship will dangerously deteriorate — and American prosperity and security will diminish — if Washington convinces itself, citing CCP talking points as evidence, that China is an evil actor rather than a proud country like any other, seeking a more elbow room and simply trying to defend what its government views as its interests.

Mark Hannah is a senior fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation and host of its “None Of The Above” Podcast.

]]>Hudson Institute’s director of Chinese strategy Michael Pillsbury talks about how China only respects power, so it’s important the Trump administration pushes back the proper amount without escalating anything.

]]>Trump Cuts US Ties With WHOhttps://michaelpillsbury.net/trump-cuts-us-ties-with-who/
Fri, 29 May 2020 13:11:09 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2201Powerful Statement: @MikePillsbury says @realDonaldTrump’s crack down on China is the toughest stance taken by any President in at least 50 years. Powerful Statement: @MikePillsbury says @realDonaldTrump’s crack down on China is the toughest stance taken by any President in at least 50 years. #AmericaFirst #MAGA #Dobbs pic.twitter.com/DvDDLbwHk1 — Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) May 29, 2020

]]>Behind Trump’s push to blame Chinahttps://michaelpillsbury.net/behind-trumps-push-to-blame-china/
Tue, 26 May 2020 19:35:51 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2196Writers like Michael Pillsbury, who enjoys access to the President, as well as Libby and others are based at the think tank. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a major hardline China policy speech in late 2018 at Hudson, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in October 2019.

]]>Trump administration mounts global campaign against China that harks to false WMD claims made before US invasion of Iraq

The rhetorical clash between China and the United States over the Covid-19 pandemic escalated to new heights this past week. Harsh language and taunts are now a daily event, feeding growing concern that the war of words could lead to more serious tensions over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

Calls for “decoupling” from dependence on supply chains for vital medical equipment and technology produced in China took concrete form in new steps to block China’s Huawei telecom giant from using American-designed technology.

Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump face challenges to their legitimacy and political future from the pandemic and the two are equally eager to deflect responsibility for the crisis.

The Chinese regime has mounted an aggressive campaign to promote the superiority of its system and assert global leadership, despite widely held doubts about the veracity of its claims. It has hawked xenophobic propaganda blaming foreigners, even the US military, for the spread of the virus.

In Trump’s case, the urgency is even greater thanks to the presidential election campaign. The campaign now places central responsibility on China, labeling his Democratic Party opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, “Beijing Biden.”

This strategy was laid out in a confidential Republican strategy memo on April 17th that instructed candidates to accuse Democrats of being “soft on China” and to claim the virus is “a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives.”

“This election is going to be a referendum on China,” Trump advisor Peter Navarro predicted in a television interview this past week.

When Trump signed a trade pact with China on January 15, things were quite different. The trade deal was a centerpiece of a re-election strategy touting a booming economy and having put “America First.” And for the next two months, Trump issued a string of praises for China and Xi, lauding the handling of the virus.

Then came a stunning collapse of the stock market, a looming recession and rising infection rates. “Trump completely panicked after Covid and the economic collapse hit his campaign,” Jeffrey Bader, former Obama administration national security advisor on Asia, told me.

“He had to find a new villain. He had to come up with all these conspiracy theories about how the Chinese handled the virus. There is a whole disinformation campaign these guys are orchestrating.”

Trump is pushing for the US intelligence community to provide evidence to support this effort, according to reports in the New York Times and other publications, and confirmed to me by a senior intelligence official.

“Regarding Trump’s next steps, he has tasked the entire US intelligence community, including CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], NSA [National Security Agency], and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], to search all of their files – intercepts, humint [human intelligence], whatever – to find out if China is responsible for COVID-19,” the senior official told me.

“When this kind of tasking takes place, it is almost certain there will be some type of ‘intelligence’ that can be overstated, manipulated, overblown, to make the case – any case.”

The official compared this to the pressure brought by former Vice President Dick Cheney on the CIA to provide evidence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda-9/11 link to justify the invasion of Iraq.

“While there is no denying the importance of determining how this came about,” he said, “it is equally hard to escape the conclusion that Trump will politicize the intelligence as a means of distraction from his own abysmal management and leadership in dealing with the pandemic. Of course, all of this is intended to serve one purpose: his re-election.”

In an unusual joint article in Foreign Policy, three former senior CIA officials warned against the politicization of intelligence by the Trump administration. They wrote:

“This pattern of politicization is particularly concerning now, as the country confronts the coronavirus pandemic. The answers to key intelligence questions – Did the coronavirus emerge from nature or escape from a Chinese lab? To what extent did the Chinese government misrepresent the scope and scale of the epidemic? – will have profound implications for the future of U.S. national security policy, especially concerning China. We know Trump’s preferred answers to those questions. What we don’t know is whether the career analysts in US intelligence agencies will be allowed to speak the truth when they uncover it.”

Charge of deliberate spread

With Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leading the charge, the Trump administration is mounting a global campaign against China, including a four-page letter sent to the World Health Organization accusing it of doing the handiwork of the Beijing regime.

In recent days, Trump and his close advisors have moved beyond their earlier attempts to pin Chinese responsibility on their suppression of information on the infection, or the lab-origin theory, to a bolder charge that the Chinese government deliberately spread the disease out into the world.

In a tweet this past week, Trump accused China of “trying desperately to deflect the pain and carnage that their country spread throughout the world.” Trump advisor Navarro, a key figure in the anti-China policy, told ABC News this past week that “China sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed” the virus.

This theory was first laid out in a little-noted commentary by Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former senior aide to Dick Cheney and now senior vice president at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank that has become the most important influencer of the administration’s China policy.

In the essay, published on April 29 in the conservative National Review, Libby argued that Xi and the Communist Party leadership were under increasing threat from multiple challenges – the protests in Hong Kong, the re-election of the pro-independence Taiwanese government, exposure of the suppression of Chinese Muslims and, most of all, the stumbling of the Chinese economy due to the Trump administration’s tough trade policy. With Trump heading for re-election, party dissent against Xi was mounting, he wrote.

The Covid-19 outbreak in China posed a new challenge for Xi. “As long as the virus raged primarily inside China – derailing only her economy, stigmatizing only her government – his troubles would soar. All the while, the world predictably would have leapt ahead, taking Chinese customers, stealing China’s long-sought glory.”

But the pandemic had a potential upside, Libby argued. Its spread diverted attention from the Chinese regime’s internal woes and “rendered disease-weakened nations more susceptible to China’s goods,” he wrote. Trump’s re-election was no longer certain and a weakened economy would impact US defense spending.

In Libby’s account, Xi went beyond simply taking advantage of an opportunity. The Chinese regime deliberately “let tens of thousands of travelers, infected among them, leave China and enter an unwary world.” All of this, he concludes, is part of the quest for world domination by Xi’s inner circle. “A fever for Chinese primacy burns among them.”

Libby is no stranger to the construction of this kind of narrative. He was Cheney’s point man in pressuring the CIA to support the false claims that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction and had links to the September 11 attacks. He was convicted in 2007 of perjury and obstruction of justice for his attempts to discredit a diplomat who disputed those claims.

Surprisingly, Libby was pardoned in April 2018 by Trump, even though former President George W. Bush had refused to give a pardon, despite pleas from Cheney.

“Libby’s presentation has the feel and smell of yet another problem in the making,” said the senior intelligence official, comparing this to the Libby role in the Iraq war buildup.

“This is Scooter’s ‘wag the dog’ fantasy,” agreed another former senior intelligence official with long experience in Asia. He dismissed Libby’s belief that the Chinese leadership would have an interest in spreading the pandemic around the world.

“Party legitimacy, Xi’s position and China’s future depend on sustained growth, even if the rate of growth is much slower,” the former intelligence official told me. “Spreading CV19 could only further depress Chinese growth and accelerate realignment of supply chains in ways that disadvantage China. Chinese leaders understand that.”

Hudson Institute connection

The alarm over China’s assertiveness is widespread in U.S. policy circles. But Hudson is home to a group of policy makers who articulate a much darker view of China as both a totalitarian state and one with long-term plans for global domination.

Writers like Michael Pillsbury, who enjoys access to the President, as well as Libby and others are based at the think tank. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a major hardline China policy speech in late 2018 at Hudson, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in October 2019.

Hudson has also become the favored channel for Japan’s Abe administration to reach the White House. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has delivered several major addresses at Hudson, where Libby, a personal friend, introduced him. Hudson President Kenneth Weinstein, another Abe friend, has been nominated to be US Ambassador to Tokyo.

While Trump’s views of China seem mostly to reflect his obsession with trade imbalances and his neo-isolationist impulses, men like Pompeo, Navarro and Libby have deeply held views on the China threat.

“For the ideologues, this was their magic moment to overcome resistance,” Bader argues. “Trump went along with it because he needs an election plank. The true believers don’t know if Trump is going to win or not but they are putting as much in place as they can before November.”

Daniel Sneider is lecturer, international policy, at Stanford University and a former Christian Science Monitor foreign correspondent. This article originally appeared Monday in Tokyo Business Today and is reprinted with permission.

]]>Steve Bannon on Hong Kong, Covid-19, and the War with China Already Underwayhttps://michaelpillsbury.net/steve-bannon-on-hong-kong-covid-19-and-the-war-with-china-already-underway/
Sun, 24 May 2020 19:23:22 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2192And this is the beginning of the selection of superstars, like Michael Pillsbury [a former government official who President Trump has called an authority on China], Matt Pottinger [now deputy National Security Advisor], and Peter Navarro. And others came into the administration, like General [Robert] Spalding. That all started with those early meetings with General Flynn.

]]>“If we blink, we’re heading on a path to war, to a kinetic war, if we don’t stop it right now. The elites are going the wrong way.”

Since leaving the White House as chief strategist to President Trump in August 2017, Stephen K. Bannon has focused almost exclusively on China. He is a member and co-founder of the “Committee on the Present Danger: China.” He has formed an alliance with a Chinese fugitive billionaire named Guo Wengui, and his daily radio show, “War Room,” launched an entire section devoted to China’s role in the coronavirus pandemic. As a regular commentator on Fox News and the subject of two recent documentaries, “American Dharma” (2018) and “The Brink” (2018), Bannon is sounding the alarms about what he says is a war that has already begun. The Wire spoke to Bannon twice over the past two weeks, first on May 12 and then again on May 23. What follows is a lightly edited interview.

Q. On Thursday, Beijing announced that it was planning new national security laws that could give China’s leaders greater control over Hong Kong and undermine civil liberties in the semi-autonomous territory. This looks like a bold move by Xi Jinping and Beijing’s leaders aimed directly at anti-government protests and dissent. What’s your view of the events now unfolding in Beijing and Hong Kong?

A. Well, this is big. In December, the Senate passed and the House passed, with only one dissenting vote, the Hong Kong Freedom Act [officially known as the 2019 Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act]. I think certain requirements have to be certified by the end of May, or the first of June. It’s up for certification right now. And I think it calls for a review of our underlying trade agreements [with Hong Kong]; the whole thing that makes Hong Kong such a great place for capital markets; and the underlying trade arrangements with the United States, including financial matters. Obviously, [the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act] can’t be certified now. This breaks all potential for certification. My strong recommendation is [for the U.S.] to go as hard-core as possible. You pull that immediately. Pull all the underlying trade arrangements we have. Also we stop and limit any activity with the [state-owned] Bank of China, or any mainland Chinese banks. The Bank of China is right there [in Hong Kong]. You restrict all activity with their money centered banks and the United States. Additionally, you go to immediate sanctions; you sanction the individuals, including the Foreign Ministry guys. And if the Politburo passes this, you go to immediate sanctions on those individuals too.

We should call a [UN] Security Council meeting immediately and dare China, as a permanent member, to block it. The world community ought to do this. On Monday morning, a holiday, the President’s got to call a Security Council meeting and dare China to fight it. This is exactly like [what happened to] Czechoslovakia and Austria. We’re in 1938. For Hong Kong, this is that moment. If we blink, we’re heading on a path to war, to a kinetic war, if we don’t stop it right now. The elites are going the wrong way. This is not a cold war. This is a hot information and economic war, and we’re sliding rapidly. We are inexorably going to be drawn into an armed conflict if we don’t stop this now. Now, I’m all for using multilateral institutions. But the United States has to stand up here. Yesterday, the Canadians, British and Australians put out a joint statement. It’s now time to take it to the UN Security Council. This is an abrogation of a treaty that was signed, and essentially ratified by the United States Senate. We did backup legislation for this.

Your position sounds incredibly aggressive.

Look, no one in the world wants war, but to avoid it you can’t look the other way. The only thing these dictatorships understand is when you stand up to them. What they [Beijing’s leaders] have done is not just outrageous, it breaks with the rule of law. Forget about the [U.S.-China] trade deal now. It’s not relevant if they do this now. This [the agreement tied to the 1997 Hong Kong handover] is one of the most important treaties of the 20th century, agreed to by all parties, and basically underwritten by the people of the United Kingdom and the United States. Listen, Prince Charles wrote in his memoirs that when the Queen’s yacht was leaving Hong Kong in 1997, after the handover, he turned around in that monsoon rain and he looked back at the flag. It was the flag of China that now fluttered over Hong Kong. And his thought was: “I feel terribly that I have left Martin Lee [a Hong Kong politician and pro democracy leader] in the hands of the Chinese Communists.” Prince Charles was prophetic. This gets to the core of what the West stands for, what the industrial democracies stand for; we either stand for the rule of law, or we don’t. The United Nations Security Council either stands for the rule of law or it doesn’t. Martin Lee and Jimmy Lai [the media tycoon] were just arrested. Lee is 81 years old!

What do you say to those who argue that you’re demonizing China?

I’m not demonizing China. This isn’t about the “Wuhan Virus” or the “China Virus.” It’s not about China. It’s about the Chinese Communist Party. Every week, and just today, I did a two-hour cable TV special, “Descent into Hell: Part 6.” I’m the only media executive in the United States who has ever given a platform to the unfettered voices from mainland China, to talk about what it is like to live through this totalitarian dictatorship. I’ve done 12 hours of it in the last six weeks. Now, I block their faces, but their voices are heard. It’s heartbreaking. And the feedback we get from the American audience is great. They can’t get enough of it. They had no idea about the suffering. America thinks they’re all Chinese Communists. I say, “You understand, they don’t own any land. There’s no personal property ownership. There’s been no land reform since 1949.”

Are you working with people in the Trump administration or members of Congress on any of these issues?

I don’t want to say who I talk to in the [Trump] administration, but I talk to people in the administration multiple times a day. And I’ve not stopped working with Congress. The Committee on the Present Danger [officially, the Committee on the Present Danger: China, an organization Bannon co-founded to combat the rise of China], we’re [working] with Congress nonstop. And we are [trying to work with Senator Marco] Rubio and [Senator Tom] Cotton and [Senator Josh] Hawley, and [Senator Ted] Cruz. There’s a whole group of super hawks [talking about the China issues]. And my question is: where’s [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi? I want the 1990s Nancy Pelosi. Her political life started because of her concern, out of San Francisco, for [what happened in 1989 in] Tiananmen Square. Nancy Pelosi went to Tiananmen [Square] in the ‘90s and she was hassled by the police. She was a fire breather!

The U.S. China [Economic and Security Review] Commission does a terrific report every year, and some of the best people working on it come from her staff. Where is Nancy Pelosi on this joint task force in Congress? She’s let her Trump derangement syndrome actually block her incredible record on human rights, in support of the Chinese people. What I love about Nancy Pelosi, and what she’s done historically, is she’s got it. It’s not about China, and it’s not about the Chinese people. Nancy Pelosi is among the first politicians to pick it up. She was anti-CCP [Chinese Communist Party] even before Trump. He was on [the case of] Japan in the ’90s. Nancy Pelosi was the first woke politician [on the challenge of the Chinese Communist Party]. But now, in a moment of crisis, she’s MIA. She hasn’t stepped into this like she did in the 1990s. We need her leadership; the world needs her leadership.

Tensions have clearly deepened between the U.S. and China, and some analysts say that on the topic of China, the Trump administration sounds increasingly like Steve Bannon. Is that what’s happening?

The reason we won in 2016 is because of China and trade. I mean, if you go back, even President Trump has admitted it. He said this during the State of the Union address, and he says it now all the time. And this is what [the] 2020 [election] is going to be. This is the only thing that matters. Not that the pandemic hasn’t changed world history, but even with the pandemic, China is the only thing that matters; the only thing that works.

Let’s take a step back. What has happened to the U.S.-China relationship in the past eight to ten weeks with the global pandemic and the disputes over the handling of it, and with the U.S. and China both pointing the finger at one another? Is this a terrible development or something that you viewed as inevitable or even necessary?

The single most important thing is that it has clarified things. It’s made things crystal clear. We’re in a war with the Chinese Communist Party. That’s what we’re talking about. It’s not China as an entity; and it’s certainly not the Chinese people. In fact, they are the biggest victims. This is the Chinese Communist Party, with their callousness, their deceitfulness, their inhumanity, and their disregard for any values. This has come to the forefront. That’s what this pandemic has done. It has exposed to the world exactly who they are, what they are, what they will do and what means they will use to get to the ends they want. They obviously want to become the world’s hegemonic power, under their totalitarian rule. The other things it has exposed is who are their useful idiots, fellow travelers and running dogs.

And who are they?

[Laughs] It’s a combination of the city of London [Britain’s financial center] and Wall Street and global corporatists, and even certain media outlets. Let me be specific. There are all these Sunday TV shows on for hours and hours. And on Mother’s Day there was a complete beat-down on President Trump and the administration’s handling of the pandemic and the economic crisis. And except for Peter Navarro [an assistant to President Trump, and director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy], and Tom Cotton, on Maria Bartiromo’s [Fox] show, China never came up on the rest of the Sunday shows, or virtually never came up. When you look at the mainstream media, it [China] is not part of the immediate conversation. And to me, that’s just unacceptable. What we have here is a global pandemic. We’re in the early stages of it. It’s already triggered an economic crisis, both demand destruction and also destruction of the supply chain and the supply side. This is an economic crisis of both demand and supply, which the world has never had at the same time. It has triggered a massive financial crisis. What happened in 2008 pales in comparison. The United States right now has put in between $9 trillion and $10 trillion of fiscal payments on the balance sheet of the Federal Reserve. And it’s on such a massive scale that people are having a tough time getting their heads around it. And all this could have been avoided if the Chinese Communist Party had a modicum of decency and a modicum of respect for their own people, for the Chinese people.

It sounds like you believe some of the conspiracy theories about the origins of the virus, that China may have done this intentionally. Is that right?

I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but I also don’t believe in any coincidences. If we find out that it was part of some experiment they were doing that went awry, or if we find out later that it was part of some biological weapons program they are not supposed to have… All of that is being investigated right now, not just by Five Eyes (an intelligence alliance made up of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand), but by many others. We’ll find that out over time, particularly as we get closer to the source in Wuhan.

But what we do know — and this is just a matter of fact — is that from the first week of December, and at least until the 20th of January, they hid this. And they particularly hid this from the Chinese people. They also hid this from the world. And they actively lied about it. They knew they had human-to-human transmission. They knew they had community spread no later than the third or fourth week of December 2019. They prosecuted many of the heroes of Wuhan who tried to get word out to their fellow citizens. As you know, they prosecuted Dr. Li [Wenliang, the early whistleblower who died of Covid-19 at the age of 33] and other heroes. And they made them sign rumor mongering confessions, which is one of the worst things you can do in China. Then they tried to suppress this. They never told the people who were traveling in and out of Wuhan until it was absolutely necessary. And thank God for one thing: this was the Lunar New Year time period, when they were forced to come forward and stop travel inside of China. Every year, that’s the largest migration in mankind’s history. They stopped that because they knew that it would explode all over China. We have no earthly idea how bad this thing could have been. So we’re very lucky in that regard, but not because of their acts. Their acts of commission, their acts of shutting down travel inside of China while allowing unsuspecting Chinese to fly throughout the world and spread the disease. They went from a net exporter to a net importer of personal protective equipment (PPE), knowing full well that PPE would be the deciding factor for the first line heroes, the first responders, doctors and nurses in the ICUs. They understood that the rest of the world could not even test without PPE. They were vacuuming up PPE in Europe, vacuuming up the United States, and they were vacuuming up Australia and Brazil.

This is equivalent to premeditated murder. And that’s why this has to be adjudicated at some point in time. They have to be held accountable because of the cold-blooded nature of this. This is shocking, even by the low standards we’ve held them to. The University of Southampton in the United Kingdom did a study that showed that had they just come forward in the last week of December or the first week of January and admitted that they had human-to-human transmission and community spread that 95 percent of the the deaths, 95 percent of the agony, 95 percent of the economic destruction could have all been avoided.

For some time, you’ve been broadcasting a radio show from the basement of your Breitbart Embassy. And at some point, the name of the show was changed from “WarRoom” to “WarRoom: Pandemic.” You seemed to be making a lot of this before Americans or even the White House took it seriously. Why is that?

I have a very good feel for China. I’ve lived there. I’ve been around China since the 1970s. I was a naval officer on a destroyer in the Pacific [7th] Fleet. Also, it’s knowing Miles Guo [the billionaire Chinese fugitive known alternatively as Guo Wengui or Miles Kwok] and the “Whistleblower Movement.” I’m the chairman of the Rule of Law Society and cofounder of the rejuvenated Committee on the Present Danger: China. We were also all over the Hong Kong demonstrations. We broadcast and called that shot in May 2019. And it’s also just getting to know the Chinese people and the Chinese dissidents and knowing the scale [of the problem in China]. It stunned me when I first heard that there might be some type of shutdown during the Lunar New Year. And particularly when I heard they were going to lockdown Hubei Province and Wuhan in the third week of January. I think Miles and I were broadcasting on the 18th and 19th. This just shows you the provincial nature of Washington, D.C., New York, and even London. The American people should understand that these centers of power in the world don’t actually have as many executives traveling around and living in these places. In a world that’s interconnected, we’ve become very provincial.

I was stunned. I went around and said, “Hey, I’m shifting to this.” We started broadcasting an hour on it in mid to late January. And then, around the 23rd [of January], I shifted to it for the full show. I was essentially going to have a “WarRoom: Pandemic” show. And I was laughed at and mocked by people I respected. They would say, “What are you talking about? This is like some type of cold or flu that’s going around China.” And I said, “No, no, no. This is an historical event. This will change the history of the world.” And they said, “Why would you say that? You always have your hair on fire over something.” I said, “Hey, Hubei [Province, pop. 58 million] is essentially the size of France [pop. 66 million]. Wuhan, which I’ve been to, is nearly 40 percent bigger than New York City. They have Hubei in total lockdown and they’ve quarantined Wuhan.” And I said, “When this regime, whose total predicate to power is economic betterment, when they go to that level and they start shutting down transportation and cancel their Lunar New Year and shut down the Forbidden City, this is big! This is a world historical event. Nothing on this scale has ever been done in human history. These people don’t do anything that is not at some level of seriousness. They’re not frivolous. The regime is quite deadly but they’re also very serious.”

And people didn’t take it seriously. I was shocked that I got mocked and ridiculed. I went and did the Bill Maher show [Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO] on Feb. 8. I’ve been on the show a couple of times. I respect their producers; it’s perfectly produced. But I only agreed to fly out there on one condition, and that was that we talk about the pandemic. And when I got there, they said: “Hey, he really wants to talk about the impeachment.” And I said, “The impeachment is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Nobody will remember this.” I said, “This is everything.” And they said, “Ok, as a compromise, we’ll introduce you in the role of your new show, ‘WarRoom: Pandemic,’ but he wants to talk about Trump.” And I’m sitting there going, “Hey, the whole campaign is gonna change. Everything’s gonna be around this pandemic.” They said, “Yeah fine, but we don’t want to talk about it.”

I thought back on that, and I said, “Oh my gosh. These are like the smartest guys in the world. They’re very bright.” But back then, people would look at me and say, “This is like the flu or cold, isn’t it?” And I’d say, “It’s not! It’s not!” And what drove that was simply the fact of my living in China and, quite frankly, knowing the dissident movement and the “Whistleblower Movement.”

As we look back at it, they were hiding things. They wanted to make sure that nothing came up before they signed the trade deal [January 15, 2020]. They wanted to make sure nothing exposed them during Davos [January 21-24, 2020], where they had organized their biggest contingent ever to Davos. But if Lunar New Year had not been in those weeks, if this had happened in, let’s say, in October or November, we have no earthly idea how long they would have tried to suppress this.

And you believe China should be held accountable for the spread of the virus?

They absolutely should. We should go back and look at whether it came out of the lab, or a weapons program. There’s a direct chain of title in their decisions. We know for a fact that they were notified no later than the last week of December, and there was already communication going back and forth. Dr. Li [Wenliang] was rounded up, I think, on the 30th of December, and maybe confessed a few days later to being a “rumor monger.” We also know that the batwoman [Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist and bat specialists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology] was notified by Scientific American. I think it was in the March issue and it said she was notified by one of the hospitals on December 30, and the first thing that came out of her mouth was, “I hope this didn’t come from my lab and one of my experiments.” [She is quoted the article saying, “Could they have come from our lab?”]

We also know that the World Health Organization and a couple of labs around China, in Hong Kong or other places, made communication and direct contact with Beijing around the first, second or third [of January]. We now know that Xi Jinping took personal responsibility starting on January 6 or 7. We know that the World Health Organization put out its press release on the 9th. Then the tweet on the 14th said that after consultation with China’s Ministry of Health that there is no human-to-human transmission or community spreading. That’s all a lie. We also know they [China] restricted travel shortly thereafter, or in China domestically. But they did not stop traveling throughout the world, particularly to Europe and the United States. And we know that they then put on an active program, starting about the third or fourth week of January to sweep up the world’s PPE. The chain of title of their cover up, the conspiracy to cover it up, and what the outcomes were is absolutely damning. This is the equivalent to Chernobyl. And that’s why I call it the “Biological Chernobyl,” because it’s the same type of approach. [New Yorker magazine editor] David Remnick’s great book Lenin’s Tomb shows you the paranoia that goes through these types of gangster operations. This is what happens when a regime starts to come under massive external and internal pressure. That’s exactly what you have in Beijing right now. Every decision they make shows their incompetence plus, they’re wanting to cover this up from the world. And so that is damning.

We ought to, quite frankly, seize their companies here in the United States. It has to be aggressive. And I’ll say this: It’s going to get there, even if people on Wall Street or American corporations don’t think we’re going to get there.

We just won a big victory on the [Federal] Thrift Savings Plan, which I think is the first of many. We need this. They’re engaged in economic warfare. You need to take it up to a hot war, economically. And that means a combination of sanctions. I think JASTA [Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act] very quickly strips them of their sovereign immunity for this action. I think you need to seize the assets of the leadership throughout the world, in Switzerland, in London, Belgravia, Midtown Manhattan, and the eight princeling families. All of their assets have to be seized. You have to start this with lawsuits around the world, from both citizens and governments. This could be tens of trillions of dollars. And we ought to talk about our debt. We ought to wipe out our debt. We ought to, quite frankly, seize their companies here in the United States. It has to be aggressive. And I’ll say this: It’s going to get there, even if people on Wall Street or American corporations don’t think we’re going to get there. This is the age of recrimination against the Chinese Communist Party, not the Chinese people but the Chinese Communist Party. We’re just beginning. When people understand the full nature of this, whether it’s in Italy, France, South Africa, India, or the United States, people are going to demand retribution.

You make it sound like the U.S. and China are on the brink of war.

We’re not on the brink of war. We are at war! This is one of the things they outlined so brilliantly in the book Unrestricted Warfare, about how to engage in modern warfare. This is a book written by two PLA colonels about the Gulf War. It was really conceived of in the mid 1990s but published in the late ‘90s. We got bootleg copies of it from the institute in the Naval War College. But now, that book, which I argue is the most serious book on strategy since Clausewitz, is telling, in that they lay out war [strategy]. There are three different types of war. They say: there’s information war, which assumes cyber; there’s economic war; and then there’s kinetic war. And their point is, “We never really want to get into a kinetic war with the West. They have obviously shown over the last couple of millennia that they’re pretty good at kinetic war. So there’s no need to do that. But we have other means to do it.” And if you look at their playbook, they’ve done it very well. And honestly, they have been engaged in a cold economic and information war with us over, I think, the last six, seven or eight years. But it’s gone hot recently.

And let me be specific. The West should have understood in the spring of 2019 that a fundamental inflection point was hit. Three things happened. Number one, they had their first big meeting of the One Belt, One Road Initiative [in Beijing], which I think only 25 or 30 nations showed up for. But Russia went; Pakistan, the nations of Persia or Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and Turkey. Those partners who are trying to consolidate the Eurasian landmass, they all showed up. And this was a telling moment. They basically went to kowtow to Xi Jinping and the One Belt, One Road program. Number two, immediately thereafter they made the most important geopolitical decision I think has been made in the 21st century, which was identified by Ian Bremmer. And that was that we are going to decouple technologically from the West. They said, “We are going to have our own standards. You know, we’re not going to build the firewall. The future Tencent, and the future [of the Chinese companies] Weibo, Alibaba, Huawei and ZTE are not going to be based upon Western technology. These are going to be based on our technology. We are basically going to break into a different camp.” And number three. On the surface, they essentially failed to take the [U.S. Trade Representative Robert] Lighthizer deal, which had they signed and executed it like it was, given its transparency and given its accountability, would have fully integrated China into the western industrial democracy system. They saw One Belt, One Road was going to drive to Made in China 2025. They felt confident enough that they could break [away] from the West and really decouple technologically. And they decided then to stop what they were doing. If they signed this deal with Trump, that it’s essentially a port treaty of the 19th century. All we’re doing is kowtowing to the West. and So to me, it was in the spring of 2019 that then they ramped up and we went to basically the start of this hot economic war. And I think now they’re full on.

And you know, the Saudi Arabian and Russian hit, the gangster hit on the American oil industry, to me is totally related to Saudi Arabia and Russia trying to be the primary supplier of oil and gas to the rising Chinese empire. In Russia, they just launched this. They just launched this gold-backed Yuan [Renminbi], and the cryptocurrency, because they were desperate to figure out how to get off the dollar as the prime reserve currency. So whether it’s on trade, manufacturing, currency, or in capital markets, you’re seeing a hot war right now.

You think this was all part of a plan to decouple that China initiated?

Well, they didn’t announce it. This all came out later, I think in the fall of 2019. But we realize that that decision had basically been made in April or May 2019. They made a fundamental decision to go to their own standards. And this was a basic decoupling from western technology. And to them, the future is technology. They were about to set up a system that you have to choose between the standards of the West or our [Chinese] standards. And that would lead to a massive geopolitical, and geoeconomic decoupling. Remember, their central focus geopolitically is the consolidation of the Eurasian landmass. And they’re doing this with their partners: North Korea, Pakistan, Persia [Iran], Turkey and Russia. I’ve been saying this for years. I went around Europe talking about it. This is why it’s 1938 that we are inexorably being pulled in, something that could slip into a kinetic war. And unless we confront China now in the information war and the economic war, we’re going to slide into a kinetic war.

Remember, go back and listen to what I said before the pandemic. I said, “We’re in a system with negative interest rates, like during the Great Depression.” At that time, by 1938, all the macroeconomic tools available had been used. And we slipped into the second part of the Great Depression. Unemployment started going up. And I said [pre-pandemic], “Hey, if you don’t figure out a financial and fiscal way to get out of this, we’re in trouble.” What they did in the ‘40s was they hit the reset button. Up until the pandemic, we were sliding into that anyway. And now this has exacerbated it. The pandemic is clearly a world historical event. It will be remembered as a world historical event. We have no idea how this is going to play out, but it’s already triggered an economic and financial crisis that is, quite frankly, deeper than the Great Depression.

How did we get here? And why is China your focus?

When I took over the campaign in August of 2016, Trump was down, I don’t know 8, 10, 12 points, depending on what poll you looked at. But I told him, “Those numbers don’t matter. I said there are only two things that matter: one is right track (one-third); and wrong track (two-thirds). People admire President Obama and his wife. They like them personally. But they still think the country’s on the wrong track.” By the way, those numbers still exist today. For years, Pat Caddell [the opinion poll analyst] has been doing his analyses of American decline, a managed decline. And for the first time, a majority of Americans felt the country was in decline; and that the elites were indifferent to that. That kind of falls into the “Thucydides Trap” argument that we are the declining power and China is a rising power, and that our elites are comfortable with that. And so as I said, “Look, what the data shows you is that Americans don’t want to be in decline. In fact, they will look for any leader who will reverse this and lead them back to their former greatness. They don’t want to be in decline.” And that’s what Trump represented. That’s why he said in the State of the Union [address] that the reason he is president is because of this; he says that fairly frequently. I continue to say all the time that it wasn’t immigration, although immigration is inextricably linked with this, and quite frankly very important. It was China and trade — that evisceration of our manufacturing base, and Wall Street actually having financed that and global corporations being uncomfortable with that. This is the decline in the United States, particularly in the great industrial heartland. It’s quite frankly, a little bit of why Brexit and Trump’s victory in 2016 are inextricably linked, because you saw the same thing happen in the industrial heartland of England. It’s been gutted out.

This is because the Chinese Communist Party’s business model is predicated upon state-owned industries. Their biggest export is overcapacity and deflation. Remember, up until we had the pandemic we had no pricing power; you had no ability to lift prices or wages. The reason you had so much excess capacity in every major industry is because of China. And this is before China created Made in China 2025, which is the convergence of advanced chip design, artificial intelligence, robotics and maybe biotechnology. The convergence of those would make China, with Huawei as the backbone of quantum computing, basically the advanced high-value-added manufacturing centerpiece of the world, for centuries to come. And everybody else would be a tributary state. Let’s be blunt. The United States would be a tributary state economically. We’d be Jamestown to their Great Britain. We’d produce pigs and oil and gas and timber.

This is the business model that the elites like. Wall Street, the capitalists, would always rather have slave labor than free labor, or labor that stands up for itself….You’ve had the slave labor of China, delivered by the Chinese Communist Party and financed by the City of London, Wall Street, and the global corporations.

This is one of the reasons the trade imbalance is so tough to close. This is the business model that the elites like. Wall Street, the capitalists, would always rather have slave labor than free labor, or labor that stands up for itself. And that’s what you’ve had. You’ve had the slave labor of China, delivered by the Chinese Communist Party and financed by the City of London, Wall Street, and the global corporations. They’ve basically made all their workers serfs, 19th century Russian serfs. And here’s the tragedy of the model, the Greek tragedy, the money that did that belongs to the workers. Remember, Wall Street is basically institutional cash. What does that mean? It’s the pension funds and the insurance money of doctors, teachers, nurses, the first responders, the labor unions; it’s money from the working class and middle class. That’s the great tragedy here and the part that’s never really explained. There’s a famous quote by Aeschylus, originally from a Libyan poem, “Once an eagle, struck by an arrow, said by my own hand, ‘I’m stricken.’ ” That’s where we are today. The United States was once an eagle, but we did this to ourselves. The Chinese Communist Party didn’t do this to us. Our elites did it. Chinese foreign policy for three or four millennia has been to get the elites of satellite nations, and basically bribe them and give them better rewards in order to make them a tributary state. That’s what is happening here.

Back in 2017, shortly after you left the White House, you visited Henry Kissinger, at his home, to talk about China. Can you say something about that meeting?

It’s quite evident and this gets back to Henry Kissinger. Let me go back in history. When I was a young naval officer, before I got off my ship and went to Georgetown and Harvard, I was taking courses at the Naval War colleges, correspondence courses, and the very first thing that you were taught was the Peloponnesian War. I said, “Gosh, I love history. I love Plutarch. I love Thucydides. And I love studying the Peloponnesian War. But why is the first thing we study the Peloponnesian War?” And they said, “Well, you have to because it’s about the declining power and the rising power.” And that was the concept of two guys, [former Dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and author, most recently, of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?] Graham Allison and Henry Kissinger. Allison was the great nuclear strategist out of Harvard, and Kissinger had been National Security Advisor. And they believed in the concept that Russia had an economic model that worked. And Russia was essentially the rising power, and they were militarily stronger. They had a better command economy, and we had to have a detente and rapprochement and SALT treaties and all that, right? Well, Reagan comes in and he’s a simple guy. They do a real analysis. Andy (the late Andrew W.) Marshall at the [U.S. Defense Department’s] Net Assessment Group, and Bill Casey at the CIA, did a reassessment of the Soviet economy. And guess what? They find out that it’s only half the size that they thought it was; just kind of a big miss, right? Reagan goes, “Well, how big are they?” And they say, “It’s about the size of the California economy.” He goes, “Why, these guys are midgets. Well, I know they’ve got nuclear weapons everywhere. But they’re not really a competitor, because they’re tiny as an economy.” That was the beginning of the end of the “evil empire.” We win. They lose. And the economic war that was run against them — on the defense budget and Star Wars and the Saudis [referring to their full oil production] and all of that — led to their collapse eight years later.

Well, that same group came up with the same phony construct that everybody bought into about the “Thucydides Trap,” where we are the declining power and China is the rising power, but in order to avoid a kinetic war, we have to gently nudge them along until they become more like us. Right! And when I met with Dr. Kissinger [in 2017], he lays it out. And I lay out my side. And he said, “Hey, I agree with your analysis. Your analysis is 100 percent correct. But your solution is 100 percent wrong.” [laughs] I said, “Well what’s your solution?” And he said, “Well, over 30 or 40 years of diplomacy we could get them to…” And I said, “Are you kidding me? We don’t have 30 or 40 years. I’m not even sure we’ve got four. Have you noticed these guys are big on dates? It’s called ‘Made in China 2025’; it’s not ‘Made in China 2055.’ And there’s no turning back.” So it’s obvious. The elites of the world have bought into this comfortable narrative. You still see it today. Richard [N.] Haass [of the Council on Foreign Relations] came out on Saturday in a full, 2,000 word analysis that was taken, I think, from his new book [The World: A Brief Introduction, Penguin Press 2020]. He walks through why we don’t want to get into a Cold War with China, and I say, “Yes, we don’t want to get into a Cold War with China, because they’re in a hot war with us right now, economically. And if we stay in a Cold War mode, we’ll lose.” He’s the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. I think he still teaches at my alma mater, Georgetown, where he’s considered one of the premier voices. And Richard Haass is a very smart guy. But this to me shows you can be too smart. And that mentality will lead to the destruction of the United States. China is in a full on economic and information war with us. And they are planning, if need be, to go full kinetic. And we do not want to get into a kinetic war in the South China Sea, around Taiwan, or around other hot spots up in the northwest, up near the Sea of Japan around Korea. We don’t want that. And to avoid that, we have to understand that they’re at war with us and we have to engage in that war today.

Is it true that after you entered the White House in 2017, China was one of the first areas you worked on?

Well, Mike [former National Security Advisor Michael] Flynn was the very first person that was picked on Wednesday morning. In fact, we knew that President-elect Trump, Jared [Kushner] and Mike Flynn would go to Washington the next morning and start the transition with the national security advisors. And Mike and I sat down and we talked about three things that had to happen immediately. Number one, we want to de-operationalize the NSC [National Security Council] that they [the Obama administration] had. And he was going to go and do due diligence. But we wanted to go to our [former National Security Advisor Brent] Scowcroft model. Basically, Mike [Flynn] would be the one that would drive the policy out of the White House, but essentially we would help to curate the different agency or stakeholder alternatives to form a basis for decisions, and you would run the war because President Trump, you know, made a campaign pledge to destroy ISIS. We knew that was going to be a huge deal with whoever we selected to be Secretary of Defense, which turned out to be Jim Mattis. But that was number one.

Number two was to find out who all the Obama detailees were and basically get rid of them; and get our people in there. Mike was going to do that. Number three was to begin getting all the documentation on President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia.” It was pretty evident to me that President Obama got it; that we were too CENTCOM [United States Central Command] oriented. We were too tied into the Middle East. And although obviously that’s important, it pales in comparison [to China]. In fact, it’s just a theater of the great existential war with the Chinese Communist Party.

We had to see, why did he [President Obama] think that? And what was done? I think we had forward-deployed a marine brigade in Brisbane, Australia. And in fact, I think it was in September of 2014 or 2015, Xi [Jinping] came for a formal visit that [then Vice President] Biden had been the negotiator on, and they signed a document that was supposed to stop cyber intrusions into businesses and to stop the militarization in the South China Sea, both of which were key points. But the Chinese did it at an even more accelerated level afterwards. So we had to get all the documentation first for the “Pivot to Asia,” and to make sure that building the China team was his top priority. And General Flynn was 100 percent [in agreement] with that. He and I talked about it during the [2016 presidential] campaign. He fully agreed.

And this is the beginning of the selection of superstars, like [now deputy National Security Advisor] Matt Pottinger, Michael Pillsbury [a former government official who President Trump has called an authority on China] and Peter Navarro. And others came into the administration, like General [Robert] Spalding. That all started with those early meetings with General Flynn.

So the “Pivot to Asia” by the Obama administration was right, but they weren’t getting any traction? They weren’t doing enough?

Look, President Obama got it. I’m not saying he was in for the confrontation, but he understood it. And he even understood this when he was a senator. I would argue that Obama and Trump are presidents with some similarities. Obama ran as an antiwar populist. Trump ran not as an isolationist but “America First.” There’s not that much difference. President Trump is not aggressive when it comes to military power. He is not quick on the trigger. Remember that Hillary Clinton, the reason we positioned her is that she is quick on the trigger. Obama’s not like that and Trump’s not like that. Although, when Trump says, “I’m taking down ISIS,” you know ISIS is going to get taken down. But Obama understood that we’re too tied up in the Middle East, and maybe not for all the best reasons. We’ve got to really think through what we’re doing there and get the combat troops out. We saw what Obama was trying to do, to pivot. His whole concept was a “Pivot to Asia.” Now, what we found out is that in reality it became more of a marketing ploy, not a reset or a “whole-of-government” approach to confronting China as a major power.

Remember, Trump’s first national security documents put the war on terror as a secondary thing and the great power struggle with China as a strategic competitor. That was all in the first year of the Trump administration. That was a huge fight because [H.R.] McMaster and these guys were still tied to this CENTCOM mentality. If you look at the Gulf War, even before then, everybody’s been promoted; everybody’s gotten to know each other. It’s all around CENTCOM and the Middle East. That’s why these guys all know each other. It’s a mindset. Besides the Navy and some Air Force, there’s not a deep knowledge of Asia. I mean, McMaster didn’t know anything about Asia. He didn’t understand economic war at all. They understand that we’ve got combat troops on the Korean peninsula. The Marine Corps is not that involved. Admiral Harry [B.] Harris was the guy I reached out to as the best strategist when he was at CINCPAC [United States Indo-Pacific Command]. Unlike at the end of World War II, when obviously we were a dominant power. We’ve let that atrophy. One thing for your readers that I want to press is this: Forget the sophistication of Washington, D.C., and New York City. These are very provincial cities with very provincial mindsets. What they are focused on is what goes on in the Beltway; what goes on in midtown Manhattan; what goes on in the Hamptons. Their lack of understanding of the world is shocking. And this is why, if you look at the leadership that we’ve seen in this whole process with confrontation with China, it’s come from the working class in the country. I can go out to Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and places like that, and have a conversation with workers. And you don’t have to get into a lot of fancy analysis. They understand that the factories went to China, and they understand that the opioids came in. They get it. So this is the kind of fundamental understanding that the elites have lost.

When Trump looks at the world, with “America First,” you look at Western Europe; you look at the Persian Gulf; you look at the South China Sea, and you look up in the northwest in the area around Japan and Korea — those four areas. When you look at the international rules based order, those four areas, a combination of capital markets, commercial relationships, trade deals and an American security guarantee, right? The bottom line is American security. That’s why we have troops in Europe; and that we have a massive amount of troops and weapons deployed to the Middle East. That’s why we have the [United States] Seventh Fleet on patrol in the South China Sea. And that’s why we’ve got army divisions at the 38th parallel in Korea, and forward deployed bases in Guam and in Japan. That is an American security guarantee.

And here’s what the deplorables know. It’s their tax dollars that underwrite this essentially $1 trillion dollar [U.S.] defense budget, because of our commitments. And more importantly, it’s their kids. It’s their kids at the 38th parallel. It’s their kids on the ships in the South China Sea. It’s their kids in the Hindu Kush [the mountainous range that stretches through Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regions], and it’s their kids in Eastern Europe. The question is: what is the program here? What are we really accomplishing? And are our allies really shouldering their burden? And I think that is what this is; “America First” was not “America Isolationist.” Look, I was in the Pacific Fleet in the 1970s, and eventually deployed from the South China Sea and the East China Sea to the Persian Gulf. I’ve never seen a president more engaged in activities in the Pacific and in Asia as Donald Trump. You could take all the other presidents since Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter, ex-Vietnam. Take it from Nixon or the 1970s. You add all their activity about Asia combined, and quite frankly, Trump is more engaged than anybody: in North Korea, Japan and China. So you can’t fault him. You can’t say he’s isolationist. He’s been more engaged than anyone. And the American people are now waking up to this.

So I want to go back to the beginning. The pandemic, it’s the difference between the signal and the noise. It’s been a lot of noise. The damage has been the signal. The pandemic has really been the providential wake up call. It’s changing world history. It’s horrific. It has gotten everybody to see exactly what the Chinese Communist Party is, and what they’re doing. Pew Research just had this amazing poll a couple of weeks ago that said that 91 percent of the American people understand that a world run by the Chinese Communist Party would be a much different and worse place than one with the United States as the dominant power. Listen, 91 percent of the American people don’t even agree that the sun’s gonna come up in the east tomorrow! These numbers are shocking. And by the way, this is Democrats and Republicans. The country’s coming together. It’s unified around [growing concerns about] the Chinese Communist Party. What we have to do and our leaders have to do, and must do, is understand that this is not about the Chinese people. They are among the most decent, hard working people on earth. And they have been abused and been a victim of this totalitarian dictatorship. And to me, that’s what is so offensive about Wall Street, the City of London and the global corporatists. The “Party of Davos” has basically been in business with them. It makes me sick to my stomach. And I think it’s outrageous. The biggest victims here have been the innocent people of China. And you know, hopefully, in this confrontation, when the Chinese Communist Party comes down, the Chinese people will finally have freedom.

Are you saying the idea of integrating China into the global economy, getting them to respect intellectual-property rights and become part of a rules-based international order is over?

Let me go back to the third week of January of 2017. There were two major speeches given. On Wednesday in Davos, President Xi went and gave his seminal speech to the World Economic Forum. That was the cover of The Financial Times. And he basically laid out the benefits of globalization, and laid it out really as China as the leader. Talk about a network effect. And the “Party of Davos” and “Davos Man” gave it a standing ovation. He was hailed as the visionary leader of the 21st century. Two days later, Trump, in the [United Nations] speech essentially gave a defense of the Westphalian system. He gave a defense of the nation state as the basic unit that we build upon. It is the highest unit that one can have, you know, that free men or free women can control and reach their fulfillment. Those two speeches are diametrically opposed to each other. And the fact is that Xi went out of his way to blame the problems of the world on the rise of populism and nationalism. OK, now that is the railhead. That’s where you start and you see the efforts. This is the decoupling.

The reason we can’t have what you just talked about, the integration, IP, everything like that, is that they knew what they were doing all along. In fact, “One Belt, One Road” is really just the British East India Company run in reverse. It’s the same exact business model, of predatory capitalism coupled with Made in China 2025, coupled with the global rollout of Huawei. And the decoupling in the spring of 2019, with the rejection of [Trade Rep.] Lighthizer’s seven vectors [U.S. trade] deal. They would not integrate and they were not prepared to integrate economically. They certainly weren’t going to integrate technologically. That is part of their long term plan. They’re a group of gangsters, but incredibly intelligent; very smart. And they have a purpose. Remember, the leadership of the West believes in the “Thucydides Trap.” Western leaders have lost confidence in their system. They think we’re the declining power in Western Europe and in the United States. And here’s the thing that I have a problem with: If you go back to Davos and the World Economic Forum, the elite of the elite bit. Every group that was there — the lawyers, the accountants, the communication specialist, the marketing specialist, the industry types — they’re all in the same business; and that’s the information business. Every one of those people knew about the Uighurs. They knew about the concentration camps. They know about the Muslims. They knew about what happened to Tibet and the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhists. They knew what happened to the house Christians. They knew what happened to the underground Catholic Church and Cardinal [Joseph] Zen. They knew about live organ harvesting. They knew about the police state. They knew about all the stuff with increasing the [internet] firewall that blocked the Chinese people off. They knew about the slave labor. They knew about all of it, and they did not care. To a person, they hailed Xi [Jinping] as the visionary leader of the 21st century. The Chinese model was going to be the model. OK, the CCP model. If you cut to three years later, we’re going to have this exactly again.

Today, as we give this interview, the Chinese Communist Party has announced there’s been another secondary outbreak in Wuhan. And 10 days from today, they will have tested all 11 million people in Wuhan. They’re gonna sit there in 10 days, on the 22 of May, and they’re gonna sit there and go: “You got the model of Donald Trump. And you’ve got the model of us, right? We have tested. You talked about mass testing. We’ve given 11 million tests in ten days. What has the United States done? What has the West done? It’s not a 21st century system. Ours is!” So they are far from backing down. In fact, they’re going from having started this pandemic, and having concealed this pandemic, and having quite frankly exacerbated this pandemic for their own purposes; they’re gonna sit there and second guess our model. “We were able to shut this thing down and stop it. Our model works. Your model can’t work” [they will say]. And so if people think the information war [coming out of China] has started, they haven’t seen anything yet.

It seems you’re beginning to be pilloried in the Chinese media…

Listen, I am public enemy number one in China because on its main television networks every day, and in the press with their [version of The] New York Times; their People’s Daily, or their Global Times, and on their CGTN [China’s state-run broadcaster] in London, they’re beating me down every day. Why is that? They understand that I am leading an effort to hold the Communist Party accountable for this, not the Chinese people. The Chinese are victims. And that drives them nuts; that I sit here every day and say of the 1.4 billion people [in China], there are only 90 million communists, and of that only 2,000 count. And of those, only really eight families are the ones who make all the decisions — the princeling families [the descendants] from the original Long March. And in addition, I say now it’s time to strip their wealth from them. These people are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They’re the wealthiest people in the world. And they are basically taking 90 percent of their wealth and putting it into the West. They are [putting it into assets] in Belgravia, in midtown Manhattan, and in Swiss banks. It’s time for the people of the world to seize their assets and strip them of their power. I’m absolutely relentless. I’m never going to stop. This is my life’s work, to call out these devils.

As you know, China is likely to be an issue in the upcoming election, and as you’ve said before, you have been making an issue of this with the likely nominee for the Democrats, former Vice President Biden. I believe you even funded a book project researched by Peter Schweitzer that referenced Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s dealings in China…

I was very engaged and involved for many years looking at Hillary Clinton and particularly the Clinton Global Initiative and the Clinton Foundation. These are the globalists and this is the way they roll. Obviously I’m a populist and I’m a fire-breathing nationalist and I’m very proud of it. And so for many years I was at Breitbart, and then we set up a group called the Government Accountability Institute that did a bunch of stuff on crony capitalism here in the United States; dealing with insider trading, and all the various ways that the political class makes themselves wealthy. And we did [a book called] Clinton Cash. I [later] made a movie about it, before I came on the [Trump] campaign. My big focus in 2016 was obviously being the voice of populism and nationalism that supported Trump and Trump’s campaign. But independently, I was spending time on the Clinton side, just going after Hillary Clinton and her globalism nonstop. The book came out in 2015, in the spring. [Afterwards] Peter Schweitzer and I discussed it and I said, “Listen, why don’t we leave the presidency out of it but look at the political class. And instead of the crony capitalism around companies in the [United] States and how they enrich themselves, let’s look at foreign money. And [let’s do it] independently, looking at both Democrats and Republicans.” And what it found with regards to Joe Biden, is it came up with the Ukraine situation, with the son [Hunter Biden]. But it also came up with the China situation. And when he was researching the book Secret Empires, I said, “Peter, hey no offense, but Ukraine and Russia is a sideshow to a sideshow. China is the main event. And what you’ve found about China is stunning. I didn’t know any of this.” He was the one who really revealed for the first time Hunter Biden’s participation in the starting of this private equity fund [that invested and did business in China]. And really, this was so fascinating in that this tied it back together.

Remember, President Obama deputized [then Vice President] Biden to be his wingman, and to really take the lead on the “Pivot to Asia.” If you go back and look at that tape [that was shown] about the Ukraine situation during the impeachment [process], in the first 15 minutes or 20 minutes it shows [former Vice President] Biden talking about his personal relationship with President Xi. I think he said he had something like 30 hours of private one-on-one meetings with Xi. Remember, in President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” the point man was Joe Biden. This is Joe Biden who pushed NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement]. This is Joe Biden who pushed China into becoming part of the World Trade Organization; and China into getting the Most Favored Nation [status]; and China’s involvement in the World Bank; China’s involvement in the World Health Organization. That’s all Joe Biden. But the book came out in 2017 in the summer, and it didn’t really have an impact, although it went after many Republicans. In fact, it’s the book that Democrats used to [focus on] Secretary of Transportation [Elaine] Chao, because it goes after her and her family quite strongly, with her relations with the CCP [Chinese Communist Party].

So this is going to be a campaign issue in the summer and fall of this year. Biden put out a new [TV] ad this morning. “Morning Joe” got an exclusive on it. But in the discussion afterwards someone says, ‘This shows you that Biden is trying to outflank Trump to the right, on who is tougher on China.’ I’ve said this for years: the framing device of 2020 is going to be China, because the subtextual framing device of 2016 was China — because of jobs. I just had Bob Kuttner, who’s the founder and publisher and editor of the American Prospect on [my own] show the other day; not exactly a right winger. And we spent 20 minutes talking about, guess what: China. He was one of the interviews I gave when I left the White House, and [back then] on Aug. 9 to Aug. 10, I said, “The biggest thing we have in front of us was China; that China was everything. It was the existential threat.” And we talked about this the other day because everything is related to this confrontation with China.

And so China is the key to the 2020 election, and what you said about Biden’s ties to China will matter?

It is going to matter. It’s gonna be weaponized and brought up. Is that the mainstream media? Look, let’s go across the board. The mainstream media today is taking the Chinese Communist Party side. You don’t see any investigative effort. You do see it out of [a few] individuals at The New York Times. You see that even at The Washington Post, I would argue. I asked someone at a competitor to The New York Times. I said, “I don’t understand why there’s not much focus on China.” They said, “Look it’s all Russia. We have a 25 person team. It’s all Russia. And, you know, we have a couple of people working on China and India.” Why is that? They said, “Well, Russia is everything. Institutionally, it’s in the DNA of this place.” It’s tough to get people to change. The Cold War was 40 or 50 years. Then you had the whole “End of History” period, right? Remember, that was American foreign policy. The Russians are the bad guys.

And part of it is that we don’t understand modern warfare. The Chinese do. [They believe in] Unrestricted Warfare. If you get into kinetic war, you haven’t done your job. That’s not the way America thinks of national security. We think of it as tanks and planes and missiles and troops. That’s war. They [the Chinese Communist Party] are more sophisticated and saying, “Hey, it’s information. It’s cyber. It’s economics. And then it’s kinetic. But you never want to fight the foreign devils in a kinetic war.” The mentality in this town [Washington] is very tough to get away from. And here’s the point: we haven’t had that much military involvement in Asia since Vietnam. We just haven’t had it. All got shifted to the Middle East. Everything in the ‘70s, really from the mid ‘80s, was the Middle East. Everything from the Gulf War, in 9/11 and terrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan and in Iran. All of it has been around Saudi Arabia; it’s all been around CENTCOM. It’s the CENTCOM mentality that Obama did try to break. Obama understood. And one of the reasons was that Obama had stood up against the war in Iraq. That shouldn’t be lost on anybody. But Obama was not as virulently against the war in Iraq as Donald Trump. Remember, Donald Trump bludgeons [George W.] Bush all the time about the mistake in Iraq, about the $7 trillion that was spent there and all the troops. I’m telling you, institutionally we don’t understand economic war. We don’t understand information war. They [the Chinese government] are masters of it. One of the things that’s going to come out about [former National Security Advisor] McMaster was his inability to understand what [deputy National Security Advisor Matt] Pottinger and Peter Navarro and others are saying: that we have to engage in this economic war and here’s the way you do it. He [McMaster] was very much just a standard stock, kinetic warfare guy.

The rhetoric sounds awfully heated, and even dangerous, don’t you think?

I disagree. It’s not heated enough. Give me a break. What are you talking about? President Trump is trying to be the statesman. Look at what they’re saying! They’re trying to smear us, like [the virus] came from an U.S. army lab. Hey they’re full bore. Did you look at what they said about me? I’m not complaining. I’m not whining. I give as good as I get. But I don’t believe [the rhetoric] is heated enough. And I don’t think the actions are heated enough. They’re at war with us. They’re in a full blown information or full blown cyber war, full blown economic war. And we have to engage in that. It’s not just the rhetoric that has to be heated, the action has to be heated. This is a fundamental difference.

I don’t think the actions are heated enough. They’re at war with us. They’re in a full blown information or full blown cyber war, full blown economic war… It’s not just the rhetoric that has to be heated, the action has to be heated.

Richard Haass and all the establishment are saying, “Now we can’t get into a Cold War,” right? We’re beyond the Cold War. They’re now engaged in a hot war. If you go back to Xi’s speech in the spring of ‘19, this is not us decoupling from them. They decoupled from us. Let me be specific, if there’s any reformer in the Chinese Communist Party it’s the brilliant intellectual strategist Liu He. He is by far the most educated, the most deeply reflective, the best read. And he understands the West as well as anybody. He took 18 months, with Wang Qishan and Xi’s OK [to negotiate a trade deal] in detail. This deal with [U.S. Trade Rep.] Lighthizer was a transformational deal. This would have fully integrated things. Those seven verticals dealt with every aspect that we had. It had full transparency, full accountability and full enforcement. And it went down to the deck plate levels to talk about the details of what regulations and legislation had to be passed in China to enforce this. OK. It was breathtaking in its scale and it united the world into one economic system. And it was absolutely, 100 percent rejected [by Beijing]. When it came time for the decision makers to look at this, the hardliners in Beijing said, “What are we doing? This is nothing more than a port treaty. This is kowtowing to the West. This is us playing by their rules and in their system. Our system is better. Our technology will eventually be better. And our economics will be better. It’s a better system. It’s a system of command and control.”

That’s why they did those things. That’s why they decoupled from us technologically and let us know that. And they basically stopped that deal and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do it in phases.’ There will never be more than phase one. They need our agricultural products. They need us to take down the tariffs, and they need western capital. Remember, the key part of the deal was to have us finance the credit card business and also to buy [their] distressed debt. They’re so over leveraged they needed the West to come in and start to buy [their] distressed debt. That’s the key to the phase one deal, which is just a symbol. So Trump said it’s the first time they ever agreed to anything [the phase one deal]. But in the spring of 2019, they let you know that war was on the horizon. They were not going to be part of the system, and not being part of the system puts you on the path to war. We’re on the path to war. Anybody that can’t see that is either naive or willfully blind, or just doesn’t understand the region and the enemy well enough to fully grasp what’s going on.

Wait, so much of America’s goods come from China, our antibiotics, our mobile phones, our clothes. Our universities are filled with Chinese students. We’ve had tremendous integration with China in every way over the past 20 years. How is this warfare really going to take place?

We could break them. They live off the dollar. You cut off all the access to Western capital markets. You immediately cut off their access to Western technology. [Including] ZTE [the Chinese telecom giant]. Remember, Xi had to beg Trump not to [put them on the U.S. blacklist] because ZTE needed component parts; because they’d collapse in 90 days. If we’re at war, let’s treat it like war. Let’s cut them off from all access to Western capital; [Let’s] cut them off from all access to Western technology. Let’s start playing hardball with the dollar, with currency. We have tremendous leverage. We’re not going to have that forever. We have it today. Also, strip their sovereign immunity. Get them into the court system. Strip all their personal assets. Make them paupers. Just seize their assets. Start doing that and these guys will break and the Chinese people will overthrow them. That’s the thing we’re talking about. I’m not talking about any middle ground [negotiating] over here with these guys for 25 to 30 years. If you do that they’re gonna win. Henry Kissinger said [to me] “Your analysis is 100 percent correct. Your solution is 100 percent wrong.” And I would disagree with Dr. Kissinger on one thing. We don’t have 40 years. Right now, this is 1938. And if you want to avoid a kinetic war in the East China Sea; and if you want to avoid a kinetic war in the South China Sea and the nations around it, and avoid a kinetic war in Taiwan, you better get up on the horse today [and fight] the information, cyber and economic war they are running against us. I don’t think rhetoric should be hotter. I think actions need to be hotter than the rhetoric.

]]>Both Republicans and Democrats now agree that confronting China is America’s paramount challenge.

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the messy divorce between the United States and China.

The Trump administration’s China policy may have drawn criticism from pockets of the political establishment for the drastic choice of method – a bilateral trade war. But its underlying sentiment against China has echoed back in a chorus of bipartisan agreement.

The latest development is Senate passage Wednesday of a bill that, if enacted, could stop some Chinese firms’ shares from trading on US stock exchanges. Non-US companies would be required to observe US audit standards and financial regulations. Publicly traded corporations would have to disclose foreign ownership or control.

The US Department of Commerce had decided just a few days earlier to require semiconductor manufacturers to obtain government approval before selling computer chips to Huawei – an example of the Trump administration’s determination to stop China’s rise to technological dominance.

That move followed a similar pattern of recent administrative actions. The US Labor Department prohibited the federal pension fund from investing in Chinese companies. The Federal Communications Commission barred Huawei and ZTE from access to the US market.

Over the past four years anti-China sentiment in both parties, Democratic and Republican, has grown more vocal and increasingly more confrontational. The Republicans have taken the lead in painting China as the primary threat to America’s way of life. The Democrats, fearful of losing elections, have joined the choir.

Now China hawks have used the opportunity presented by Covid-19 to attack the Chinese government’s image and ramp up the general discontent with China that has now become a core component of American political discourse.

But exactly how far does this go?

Think tank land

Since President Donald Trump took office, there has been a steady trend on Think-Tank Row to adopt the anti-China mantra. Covid-19 has taken that line and blasted it through amplifiers all across the US, especially in the media-industrial complex, where 24-hour news cycles increasingly portray China in a negative light.

For example, the Brookings Institution, an influential think tank with strong ties to the Democratic Party, has recently painted China’s long-term strategy as a revisionist attempt to deconstruct the liberal world order and displace the US as the predominant world power. What’s more, say Brookings analysts, Beijing’s foreign policy objectives with the Belt and Road Initiative are an absolute affront to democratic governance.

The think tank has not hesitated to claim that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is exploiting the Covid-19 crisis to discredit US leadership. And it calls for enhanced competition with China as the paramount strategic concern for the US.

Such sentiments echo Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, an influential book widely read within conservative circles in the US, especially by key figures within the Trump administration.

The Atlantic Council also has used Covid-19 to double down on its stance on China. In a recent webinar, one speaker compared Covid-19 to the bubonic plague, not missing the chance to point out that after the plague “Europe” experienced a renaissance that took it on a path to science, industrialization and ultimately democracy.

Covid-19 therefore is a “calling card” for America to restore its path of building multilateral coalitions and reinforcing the liberal world order without Xi Jinping’s CPC.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has sharpened its grip on the China narrative by documenting bipartisan agreement on Asian policy on Capitol Hill.

Democratic Representative Stephanie Murphy, for example, said in a speech that there’s “an emerging consensus that the US and China have entered a … contest between opposed political and economic systems, and between different visions for the future of Asia and the world writ large. On the political front, it’s a contest between authoritarian rule and democratic rule. On the economic front, it’s a contest between a state-led model and a market-based model. It’s a contest in which the US must prevail.”

A letter signed both by Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Republican Senator Ted Cruz blasted the National Basketball Association (NBA) for apologizing to the China.

Then there are the myriad pieces of legislation aimed at accelerating the decoupling of the US from China-centered supply chains.

One of these is the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act of 2019, which directed the Federal Communications Commission to publish a list of equipment and services that would pose a national-security threat to US communications networks and prohibit the use of federal funds to do business with entities on that list.

Biden at center stage

Finally, within the Democratic Party itself, there has been a not-so-silent recognition that cooperative engagement with China is no longer a politically viable option.

During his vice-presidency, one of Joe Biden’s major tasks was to cultivate a good relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping. This was in line with the Obama administration’s strategy to foster a symbiotic relationship with China while incorporating it peacefully into the world order.

As late as May 2019, Biden played down the threat China posed to the US in response to the Trump administration’s trade war. In a public statement, Biden claimed that China was not competition for the US.

But as Covid-19 continues to pressure American leadership to rev up attacks on China, Biden has begun singing a different tune, especially as his campaign for president turns its focus on highlighting Trump’s horrific response to the pandemic.

A recent controversial campaign ad stated that Trump “rolled over for the Chinese,” and painted Biden as a figure who would have been tougher on China. Background images of Chinese security forces coupled with an abundant display of American flags assure all that Biden means business.

In recent days, Trump’s re-election campaign team has focused on reversing this image, sending a barrage of messages that display Biden as “cozying up to the Chinese” in one way or another.

And this spells trouble for democracy. Regardless of Biden’s personal feelings toward China or President Xi, the political situation at home will force him to take an increasingly hostile stance toward the country.

What’s more, the foreign policy advisers on Biden’s team are beginning to form a new outline of how America’s strategic policies would look under a Democratic White House. While Democrats still believe in international cooperation, they are becoming increasingly hostile to the thought of allowing China to benefit from that process.

Advocating for a “free world,” the Biden strategists are focusing their response to the spread of authoritarian and “illiberal regimes” around the world and beginning to question some of the assumptions underpinning US foreign policy for the past decade.

For example, in a Foreign Affairs article, Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs during the Barack Obama administration, and Ely Ratner, Biden’s deputy national security adviser in Obama’s second term, argued that the guiding principles of Obama’s stance on China were wrong.

In the last two decades, many American policymakers believed that commercial engagement with Beijing would gradually force China to liberalize and become a responsible stakeholder in the international rules-based order.

Instead, many within the Washington Beltway now lament China’s budding authoritarianism, its digital dystopia of surveillance, internet control, and the “social credit system” that supposedly rewards and punishes Chinese citizens on their political and social activity.

The US foreign-policy community is waking up to the reality that previous expectations about China were flawed and is now searching for a strategy to deal with the evolving geopolitical situation.

The danger is that the search will end in a truly awful choice. The experts may miscalculate the extent to which they can confront China and put the US on course to permanent decline.

The rhetoric of the New Cold War with China might supercharge the illusionary feeling that America is on a moral mission to beat its Chinese enemies – a rerun of the original Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Assuming that the US is an inherently virtuous nation and turning geopolitical competition into a Manichaean battle of good versus evil may backfire horribly for US decision makers.

If the US actually loses the competition, there’s no telling how political leaders and Americans will respond. Failure to adapt to realities has proved destructive in the past, especially the reality that something deep down is wrong with your institutions.

Chamber’s view

Until recently, the US business community declined to completely embrace economic decoupling. Many business leaders instead tiptoed around, playing safe with Chinese leadership while navigating the political currents at home. China, after all, is great for profits.

When Washington still believed the CPC would liberalize government and economy, most executives acquiesced to what many in the business community perceived as an unequal relationship.

But now, according to the American Chamber of Commerce, many US companies are beginning to voice their grievances more loudly, with distrust of China growing each year. This partially explains why Trump’s China policy has garnered a lot of bipartisan support – something the Chinese leadership clearly underestimated in 2017.

This reticence partially explains the difference in rhetoric between the Republicans’ more hawkish views on China and the emerging “2021 Democrats.” The Republican hawks favor taking a more aggressive posture on China while abandoning some of the multilateral approaches taken by previous generations. That’s what “America First” is all about.

In contrast, Democrats like Stephanie Murphy want to confront China by building stronger partnerships with trusted regional allies while developing alternative supply chains for the US business community.

Either way, one thing is certain: Cooperation with China is dead.

Hunter Dorwart is an independent researcher living in Washington, DC. He explores issues on a range of topics including startup financing, international trade policy, artificial intelligence, and geopolitics.

]]>Pillsbury on 5G Race Between U.S. and Chinahttps://michaelpillsbury.net/pillsbury-on-5g-race-between-u-s-and-china/
Wed, 20 May 2020 11:34:53 +0000http://michaelpillsbury.net/?p=2185Competing Against China: @MikePillsbury says it is time to implement @POTUS’ vision and toughen our tactics against China’s expansion. Competing Against China: @MikePillsbury says it is time to implement @POTUS’ vision and toughen our tactics against China’s expansion. #AmericaFirst #MAGA #Dobbs pic.twitter.com/uPifOhDq0Y — Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) May 19, 2020